Xiaomi

Xiaomi, the brainchild of investor and tech guru Lei Jun, redefined the Chinese smartphone market by launching an extremely powerful smartphone running on a smartly-designed Android skin at a price almost anyone could afford. Other companies have since followed Xiaomi into the cheap-smartphone fray, but the company’s success has proved difficult to copy. It has also proved difficult to predict, ignoring the expectations for a tablet launch and instead launching a set-top box for online video. Where will Xiaomi go next? We have no idea. But whatever the company does is sure to be interesting.